The Enemy Within: Terrorist Enablers on the Potomac

Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus had a brilliant
idea: they would fund, arm, and train a proxy army in Syria, overthrow the
regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and jump on the rapidly moving train of
the “Arab Spring” to extend US influence in the region. What could go wrong?

Plenty.

The “Free Syrian Army” created by Washington is, today, fighting alongside
al-Qaeda and its Salafist allies, filling the vacuum left behind by the “Islamic
State”/ISIS as it contracts under fire from Russian war planes and the Syrian
army. As Middle East specialist Juan Cole points
out:

“[E]ven as Daesh has been set back, al-Qaeda has recovered
some of the territory lost to the SAA earlier this year southwest of Aleppo.

“Al-Qaeda is allied with the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar al-Sham) and the Jerusalem
Army among other hard line Salafi Jihadis. These groups are in turn allied with
remnants of the old Free Syrian Army (mostly Muslim Brotherhood) that are supported
by the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. That is, the US-backed groups are battlefield
allies of the allies of al-Qaeda. US and Gulf-supplied weaponry routinely makes
its way to al-Qaeda.”

Those geniuses in Washington thought they could take advantage of the jihadist
siege of Syria to create the conditions for a three-sided civil war in which
Assad would be overthrown, the Islamic State would be decimated, and their “vetted”
sock puppets would wind up in the saddle. Indeed, it was the same strategy the
neoconservatives envisioned in Iraq, where the Shi’ite majority and the Sunni
minority would supposedly be sidelined by Ahmed
Chalabi and his “vetted” Iraqi National Congress – except, for some
reason, things didn’t turn out that way.

What happened instead is that Chalabi – a marginal figure, who had no support
inside Iraq, and was an Iranian agent
from the get-go – defected, the Shi’ite majority took state power and the Sunnis
rose up, embroiling the country in a vicious civil war that eventually generated
ISIS.

A parallel process is unfolding in Syria: the US-created “Free Syrian Army”
had no real support on the ground in Syria and was soon marginalized and absorbed
by battle-hardened jihadists. Succored by the
Turks, the Qataris, and the
Saudis, this third force wasn’t the result of US manipulations, but the
consequence of a split
in the jihadist ranks, pitting ISIS against the old-line followers of Osama
bin Laden in al-Qaeda. So that, today, we see US-supported Syrian rebels fighting
on the same side as those who took down the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
on September 11, 2001.

Not that this obscenity wasn’t anticipated by Washington. Indeed, Gen. Petraeus
has long been an advocate of openly allying
with “moderate” fighters within al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the al-Nusra Front.
This strategy is an extension of his “surge” operation in Iraq, where the US
military allied with Sunni tribes in what was deemed the “Arab Awakening” –
the very tribesmen who later morphed
into ISIS and crossed the border to wreak havoc in Syria.

I have to laugh when I hear Donald Trump declare that we shouldn’t become involved
in the Syrian civil war by arming the rebels because “we
don’t know who they are.” We know precisely who they are – and that is the
great crime at the heart of our policy.

The Obama administration has taken the same course set out by the neoconservatives
who were at the helm during the Bush years: instead of going after the Sunni
jihadists who are the core of al-Qaeda and ISIS, they have been intent on eradicating
the last remnants of the old secular despots like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and
Assad, empowering the Sunnis, and working to whittle down the “Shia crescent”
in preparation for a final assault on Tehran. And if they have to ally with
the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to do it, well then so be it.

Standing behind this Orwellian turn in US policy are our allies in the region:
the Saudis, the Gulf emirates, and the Israelis. The motives of the first two
are ideological: Riyadh and Doha are engaged in a holy war against what they
see as the rising influence of Shi’ite Iran, and are determined to stop Tehran
by any means necessary. That’s why they have been funding, arming, and directing
the jihadist armies currently decimating what is left of Syria.

The Israelis, who have long schemed to overthrow their old enemy in Damascus,
are motivated by strategic
concerns: they much prefer to see Syria in chaos rather than under Assad’s
control. Their target is, as always, their principal enemy, Iran, which is aiding
Hezbollah in Lebanon and sending fighters to prop up Assad. In the religious
war that is tearing the Muslim world apart, they have clearly taken the side
of the Sunnis: in covert alliance with the Saudis, their
American lobby has been agitating for US intervention in Syria for years.

And now the Sunnis have opened up another front in their war on Tehran: in
Yemen, where Saudi forces are carpet-bombing
civilian areas in support of a “government” that has lost all legitimacy.
The Houthi rebellion – which I wrote about here
– is caricatured as Iranian-sponsored “aggression,” when the reality is that
it is the invading Saudis who are the real aggressors. Their war – with full
US backing – has killed many thousands, with civilians caught in the middle
of a vicious conflict that is now deadlocked. And it has had another deadly
consequence, as Reuters reports:

“Once driven to near irrelevance by the rise of Islamic State abroad and
security crackdowns at home, al Qaeda in Yemen now openly rules a mini-state
with a war chest swollen by an estimated $100 million in looted bank deposits
and revenue from running the country’s third largest port.

“If Islamic State’s capital is the Syrian city of Raqqa, then al Qaeda’s
is Mukalla, a southeastern Yemeni port city of 500,000 people. Al Qaeda fighters
there have abolished taxes for local residents, operate speedboats manned by
RPG-wielding fighters who impose fees on ship traffic, and make propaganda videos
in which they boast about paving local roads and stocking hospitals.

“The economic empire was described by more than a dozen diplomats, Yemeni
security officials, tribal leaders and residents of Mukalla. Its emergence is
the most striking unintended consequence of the Saudi-led military intervention
in Yemen. The campaign, backed by the United States, has helped Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to become stronger than at any time since it first
emerged almost 20 years ago.”

One has to wonder how “unintended” is this consequence.
The Saudis have been exporting their austere Wahabist ideology for decades,
creating and expanding al-Qaeda’s mass base in the Arab world. And if the censored
28 pages of the Senate-House report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks are ever
declassified – which reportedly details their role in funding and enabling it
– the true extent of Riyadh’s role in empowering al-Qaeda will blow the US-Saudi
alliance to kingdom come.

The truth about our Middle Eastern policy is that we are now allied with our
most deadly enemies – in Syria, in Yemen, and in Saudi Arabia itself. The money
and influence wielded by the Saudis and the obscenely rich mini-states of the
Gulf has corrupted Washington to the point where our own government has become
complicit in the terrorist threat that looms over us at every turn – a threat
that is used by the Beltway politicians as a pretext for their endless wars.

What we need is a foreign policy that puts America first: stop defending the
Saudis, stop intervening on the side of our enemies, and leave the snake-pit
of the Middle East to stew in its own poisonous juices. Before we can do that,
however, our bought-and-paid-for political class has to be swept away in a tide
of populist anger of the very sort that we are now seeing arising
all over the country.

The main enemy isn’t overseas: they’re living
the good life here in the USA, right on the banks of the Potomac. The warmongers
who control both political parties, the foreign lobbyists, and their shills
in the media – these are the enemies within who must be exposed and expunged
from public life.

What we are seeing today is the first stirrings of
such a movement – and it’s only going to get more intense. That’s something
I look forward to every day, because as Bob Dylan said on the cusp of another
great era of tumult in this country: the times they are a changing!

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed
by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative,
often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo